Atomic Blonde Review

Atomic Blonde is a nice addition to the action style brought about by the John Wick franchise and the Daredevil series, but it is a terrible spy drama.  Full review, and spoilers, below the cut.

Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 1: For Want of a Villain

I've been thinking about the show Avatar: The Last Airbender a lot lately and decided to re-watch the series and do a write up for each season because I'm bored and feel like taking a break from politics. Also I'm starting grad school soon so I figured it'd be a good idea to start stretching those analysis muscles before the semester starts. The main thing I'm focusing on is how the show ups the quality and stakes of its conflicts by scaling up the quality of their villains in each season. Write up, and spoilers, below the cut.

( I don't want to do a whole plot summary for the show, so if you haven't seen it, watch the opening. It's only a minute.)

Let me just say that overall, I really love this show. It's the best supernatural martial arts show anyone has ever done, with a incredibly rich and developed world of disparate cultures and  peoples. That being said, this first season is, by a wide margin, the weakest in the series.

The primary reason for this is that the season doesn't have a very strong antagonist. Zuko is a red-herring since he's more of what's called the deuteragonist (literally the second most important person in the story) more than an antagonist. Sure, he is the primary pursuer of our main trio, but that is more because he needs them as objects to fulfill his own personal quest of restoring his honor and his destined place in the world. 

Zuko doesn't act out of any real sense of enmity; he, like Aang, is simply pursuing the person he thinks will help him restore balance to a world gone upside down. Enmity develops between Zuko and the main trio, because how can you not sorta hate the person trying to capture and imprison you, but this is used by the creative team as a smokescreen to obscure the similarities between Aang and Zuko this early in the story. It's good long-form story-telling, but it has the unfortunate side effect of sidelining Zhao, the actual antagonist, negating any threat he could pose.

Zhao, voiced wonderfully by Jason Issacs, is more of an impediment than he is a threat. He fights both Aang and Zuko one-on-one on two separate occasions over the season and is beaten by both of them. In Aang's case, Aang doesn't even throw a punch, he just tricks Zhao into destroying his own boats. Even when Zhao has Aang imprisoned, a disguised Zuko waltzes in and out of the prison Aang's being kept in with only minor difficulty. And since Zhao's pursuit of Aang is more of an attempt to humiliate Zuko, he's barely proactive in hunting down the main trio of Aang and siblings Sokka and Katara. 

Zhao, at best, is making his decisions as reactions to the actions of two other people, he never really seizes the initiative or forces anyone to reconsider their game plan. Sure, they have to work around him, but they do, easily and repeatedly. It really says something that the only time Zhao poses a legitimate threat is in the finale where the main trio, having successfully evaded him, are training in the North Pole. Basically, the team corners themselves and even Zhao can't fuck up posing a threat in that position.

But Zhao's incompetence does serve a broader, more important story function. His bumbling interference serves as a way to keep the Gaang (the shorthand term for Aang, Katara, and Sokka) out of any serious or perilous physical or emotional situations that they aren't prepared to handle. They're a relatively weak and incompetent lot of heroes, so they need a villain who's at the same level as they are and, on the other hand, prevent someone who is more driven and passionate in chasing the Gaang from fulfilling his own quest. Zhao is basically padding in living form- he keeps the story going without adding anything meaningful to it. It makes stretches of the season boring, unfortunately, but at this point he's something of a necessary evil.

The other aspect of this show that doesn't quite get used to the full extent is the cost of the war and its effect on the world these characters live in. "The Southern Air Temple", "Jet", and "The Northern Air Temple" are the episodes that handle the conflict and its costs best, but for a large part of the season, you could be forgiven that stopping this war is the whole point of making sure Aang learns how to use four elements. 

In context, I don't consider this criticism as important as the one about Zhao's listless villainy because, one, the characters themselves are still immature and don't have the full real-world experience to handle being fully exposed to the war, and two, when the writers do dip their toes into this area, they do exceptionally well.

The two Air Temple episodes are fantastic looks at Aang and his survivor's guilt. The death of his people, his culture, his entire heritage, crushes him in both episodes to a fantastic degree. Also, "The Northern Air Temple" introduces us to the Mechanist, a man who has converted the temple into a mechanized factory of sorts to build hot-air balloons and gliders for the surviving members of his tribe, including his crippled son Teo, after a Fire Nation attack. It's later revealed that the Mechanist has been building weapons for the Fire Nation for years. He explains that shortly after they came to the temple when Teo was still a baby, Fire Nation troops found them and threatened to kill them. In order to spare their lives, the Mechanist offered his services, and the troops accepted. 

What's most impressive about the whole episode is that while the show portrays the Mechanist's actions as terrible, it doesn't apply the same treatment to the man himself. Instead, they play them as a man who had to make a terrible choice, a man who knows that the same methods and devices he's using to create a safe, loving life for his son and the people he loves are, at the same time, destroying families and lives exactly like his every day. It's an awful burden, and to see it introduced and handled so well in any form of media is impressive as all hell, no matter if it's just a "kids" show.

Similarly, the episode "Jet" gives Katara and Sokka an opportunity of their own to see what they could become if they let go of their own code. The eponymous character leads a rag-tag group of child soldiers in a resistance against the Fire Nation soldiers garrisoned nearby. Like Sokka and Katara, Jet's mother was killed by Fire Nation soldiers-everyone in his group lost someone to the Fire Nation- like the Gaang, Jet is part of a loosely assembled band of children way out of their depth doing what they can to bring down an army that has ruined so much of their lives.  

 

Unlike the Gaang however, Jet becomes the very thing he hates the most. His plan in the episode is to manipulate Aang and Katara into filling up the local reservoir, then blow it up, flooding the town killing solider and civilian alike. He justifies himself by saying he wants to kick the Fire Nation out of the valley, and by killing everything, well that fulfills his mission. 

This "make a desert, call it peace" is the same style of conquest the Fire Nation engages in and Jet justifies himself by saying if you want to beat them, you have to use their own tactics against them. Unlike the example with the Mechanist, the show doesn't cut Jet any slack (at least not yet) because when confronted with the monstrosity of his choices and their consequences, he refuses to alter them. Again, the show doesn't downplay or diminish the validity or scale of his loss, but it does hammer home that no matter the pain or circumstance, our choices are always our own, and we will have to reconcile them sooner or later.

All that said, I still recommend the watching the show and starting it from this first season. The individual episodes are strong- "The Fortune Teller" and "The Great Divide" are the only real duds in the season- even if they don't do a very good job of building momentum towards the climax of the season. The three-part finale is (and I do hate using this) epic in all the best ways. 

 

Main reason I don't feel this season is bad, exactly, is because all the primary complaints I have with it disappear in the next two seasons once the trio moves directly into the main theaters of the war instead of being on its fringes. 

This season is very much concerned with laying the foundation for all the conflicts and character growth still to come and it does that quite well; everything is comparatively low stakes because the characters don't have the physical or emotional abilities to handle the higher ones yet. So while that may make for a dry and sometimes difficult experience watching the story, it's still necessary and I'm glad the showrunners got it all done at once.

That's all I've got for the first season.  Next up: Season two and the wrecking ball that is Princess Azula.

Rotting Our Brains Over Russia

On Tuesday Donald Trump Jr. released the email chain that led to his meeting a Russian lawyer with his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and his dad's then-campaign manager Paul Manafort.  There was much screaming of 'collusion' from pretty much every left-leaning news source the minute Dipshit Jr. released the emails, with the same matching yawns and shrugs in conservative circles.  Actual lawyers say that the emails by themselves are damaging but not enough to go to court let alone get a conviction, but, there's outrage to be had so the hell with those people.

I've written before about why I'm skeptical of the whole Russia business because I've always felt that it would be used as a distraction by the Democratic Party to point the finger at the traditional boogeymen of The Rooskies meddling in American affairs to cover up their own plentiful failings losing an election they should have easily won.  And for the most part, I still believe that.  I don't see Trump losing anything or Democrats gaining anything they didn't already have as a result of this so I'm more than a little frustrated that they still make this such an important cornerstone of their opposition to Trump.  But, we'll get to that.  First off I want to actually look at these emails and what we should, and should not, glean from them.

The headline exchange happens right away, with British music publicist Rob Goldstone telling Jr. that he knows a lawyer with documents from the (not-actually-a-thing) "Crown Prosecutor of Russia" to use against Hillary Clinton.  Goldstone also says that the documents come straight from the Russian government as part of "[their] support for Mr. Trump."  Jr. took the meeting and, according to him, did not receive any information since the lawyer just wanted to talk about adoptions.  According to Jr., the whole thing lasted twenty minutes and was done.  Leaving aside that his defense of not colluding with Russia is "I fully intended to receive incriminating information from possibly dubious sources, but since that was just a ruse, it's kinda like I'm the victim here" it's worth the effort to breakdown the law people are claiming he violated and whether or not the emails prove that he did.

So, the rope people are wanting to hang Jr. by is  campaign fiance law 52 U.S.C. 30121, 36U.S.C. 510 which says:

"A foreign national shall not, directly or indirectly, make a contribution or a donation of money or other thing of value, or expressly or impliedly promise to make a contribution or a donation, in connection with any Federal, State, or local election."

The law also says that a political campaign cannot solicit or receive donations of value from foreign entities, with the specific language relevant to that being:

"No person shall knowingly provide substantial assistance in the solicitation, making, acceptance, or receipt of a contribution or donation."

So does Jr. solicit a contribution from an outside source? Not in the way we usually think of it, no. Goldstone made first contact so from what we have, nothing shows anyone related to the campaign reaching out to Goldstone or anyone else asking if they have contacts in the Russian government and if they could hook them up, so that just leaves the "substantial assistance" path in going to the meeting under the belief he would be accepting a contribution.  It's there, but it's also not a lot. 

Second, did Jr. receive anything of value from the meeting? There's no proof that he did, either in the emails themselves or from any other reporting, so that, too, is something of a dead end until we have you know, actual proof and stuff.  Which, I understand not believing him about not getting anything, especially since he changed his story regarding this meeting three times, but if you want him to get dragged into court over this, you need more than "He's a lying piece of shit" to submit into evidence.

Even then, if evidence came out detailing that Jr. did indeed receive something from this meeting, we aren't quite done yet.  Because then you would to prove that whatever hypothetical thing Jr. received at the meeting was something of value.  So if this information was something that was public record, it's hard to see that meeting a specified definition of value in court considering that anyone could have found it and given it the Trump campaign, if said documents even exist.  Without knowing what information theoretically was on offer, or the methods it was obtained by, saying that Jr. went to receive hacked information is just reckless and only sets people up to issue yet another retraction to anything involving Russia and the hacking scandal.

The other part of the emails I want to look at is whether we should actually believe Goldstone was acting on behalf of the Russian government like he claims.  Goldstone's email does lay out his own connections to Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov (Goldstone represents Agalarov's popstar son), who met with a man named Yuri Chaika (who is Russia's equivalent of an Attorney General) who would pass along the information to a woman named Natalia Veselnitskaya who then, in turn, would pass it on to the Trump campaign.  It's a believable, self-contained chain of events, but I have three main hangups.  The first is that this spy-novel chain of association is proof of espionage is the exact same kind of reasoning used against political dissidents in both of our previous red scares so I think it's good to be resistant to anything that pulls you in to the same fever dream of paranoia like we've already done.  The second is believing that a government run by a former KGB agent who has in all probability assassinated people for possibly exposing his activities would orchestrate a plan to give out secret information via two guys using their personal emails and signing each one in their own fucking name. It's a Get Smart chain of events that's too stupid to believe happens in real life.

The last hangup I have is that the thing Jr. says Veselnitskaya wanted to talk about, the Magnitsky Act-which bars certain Russian officials from entering the U.S. or using U.S. banking systems- is something Putin has been trying to get reversed since it was passed in 2012. Also keep in mind that Veselnitskaya has usually been the front woman for that lobbying and that she was involved in the criminal case that got the Magnitsky Act's namesake killed regarding the $230 million fraud that was settled for $6 million in May. Point being, there's good enough reasons to believe that the meeting was to set up a more mundane form of corruption than the sensational. If you're wondering why all the pretense then, if it's just the usual level of evil, consider how the Trump's have no interest or understanding of actual policy so if they had been contacted with a proposal to talk with a Russian lawyer about a law they probably couldn't even name until they needed to say it on T.V. this week, they would've never been let in the building.  But, if the meeting is some cloak-and-dagger nonsense about juicy state secrets passed on by the Russian government, well, here we all are.

What the emails do prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that the Trump campaign was perfectly willing to knowingly accept dirt from the Russian government and lie about it.  And as for the line that Trump himself didn't know about the meeting?  Bullshit.  There's no way his eldest son, son-in-law, and campaign manager have a meeting in his own building a floor beneath his office and he doesn't know.

So, what does it all mean for us as a country?  In my opinion, this will turn out to mean very little, if anything at all.  If we all woke up tomorrow with video evidence of Vladimir Putin speaking, in English, to Donald Trump about how he was going to rig the election for Trump, I doubt you could find a significant amount of Republicans to believe it, or care even if they did.  To them, it'll be just another Fake News story trying to tear down Trump over the Russia business.  Even for the ones left in reality, do you really expect a Republican voter to care that Hillary Clinton got cheated out of an election?  Please.  Republicans will upgrade gay people from deviant abominations to maybe real people before they shed a tear for anything that befalls Hillary.

On the other side of the aisle, Democrats are wasting whatever political interest or goodwill they could've mustered by focusing on a vague, abstract injury than the real, specific ones Trump is trying inflict on people.  Instead of talking about how Republican governors are lowering the minimum wage in four states, Democratic politicians and media pundits are content to stay focused on Russia, just to be sure the image the party has of caring more about it's own political ambitions and prospects than the lives of actual people outside of the coast cities doesn't get replaced by anything more, I don't know, worthwhile.  God forbid the party change tactics and try to get more people to show up and vote for them, then they could be held accountable for shit instead of just saying how terrible Republicans are.  I am honestly curious how Democrats expect their bleating about Russia to bring back young and independent voters who abandoned them for policy reasons, but, if the people who lost 1,000 seats at all levels of government think this is a winning strategy, who is anyone to say otherwise?

But wait, I'm sure some of you will say, they talk about it all the time because it violated our democracy and national character, or something.  To which, I say, the United States has never been all that interested in being a functioning democracy that let everyone have a voice, and indeed had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing so.  And even today, the whole of the South is still trying to make sure as few black people vote as they possibly can, because fuck them, right?  So, whatever spirit of democracy got offended was just the one we pretend to have instead the one that actually exists.  I do agree on the second point, though, that an interference in our election would be a blow against our own sovereignty and character, but, who do you really think we are?

National identities, like everything else, aren't intrinsic, they're made.  At the end of the day, the Constitution is just a bunch of words on a page, the principles behind them don't mean anything unless people make the conscience choice to force their government to live by them, and we, as a country, have abandoned that for a long time now.  You can't really have a meaningful protection against unreasonable search and seizure if you live in a country where the government intercepts and records every single communication you make.  Torture, kidnappings, assassinations, and imprisonment without trial are sorta incompatible with the whole due process and trial-by-jury things.  We willfully  traded all those away and either exiled or imprisoned anyone who bothered to remind us that these things were kind of awful.  When it comes right down to it, Russia interfering in our elections amounts to one oligarchical state taking pot shots at another oligarchical state that has a high value on pretense.  If you factor in all the democracies we've overthrown, then it looks more like an amateur giving an old pro a solid punch to the nose it didn't see coming.  In that context, it honestly makes more sense to me why we would take the Russia thing so horribly: it means we're becoming just like everyone else.  And that, is the worst thing in the world to us.